I am writing to ask each and every one of you to stand up and be counted in support of our campaign to free 38 writers and journalists from prison in China.

As part of our We Are Ready for Freedom of Expression campaign, PEN American Center will be delivering a petition to the Chinese Consulate in New York on April 30, 2008—100 days before the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremonies—requesting the release of our jailed colleagues and seeking an end to internet censorship and other restrictions on freedom of expression in China. We want to make sure the name of every single member of PEN American Center is included among the thousands of signatures we are gathering for this petition.

If you have not already done so, please take a moment right now to sign this petition: www.pen.org/chinapetition

Your efforts will make a difference. Since the launch of this campaign on December 10, 2007, four writers and journalists have been released from Chinese prisons.

Once you have signed, or if you have already have, please spread the word and urge 10 friends or family members to sign on as well. Simply direct them to: www.pen.org/chinapetition

If you would like to do more, also sign our parallel petition to United States Congress to prohibit U.S. internet companies from helping China censor the internet and jail cyber-dissidents. Visit our campaign page at: www.pen.org/china

With your help and the help of all who support literature and freedom to write, we will free many more of our jailed colleagues before the Olympic Games begin.

The biggest issues with books like The Subsidiary often have to do with their underpinnings—when we learn that Georges Perec wrote La Disparition without once using the letter E, we are impressed. Imagine such a task! It takes a high. . .

Death by Water, Kenzaburo Oe’s latest novel to be translated into English, practically begs you to read it as autobiography. Like The Changeling, as well as many other works not yet released in English, Death by Water is narrated in. . .

Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals is about the type of unique, indestructible, and often tragic loyalty only found in families. For a brief but stunningly mesmerizing 169 pages, Twenty-One Cardinals invited me in to the haunting and intimate world of the. . .

We know so very little; so little that what we think to be knowledge is hardly worth reckoning with at all; instead we ought to settle for being pleasantly surprised if, on the edge of things, against all expectations, our. . .

Many of Virginie Despentes’s books revolve around the same central idea: “To be born a woman [is] the worst fate in practically every society.” But this message is nearly always packaged in easy-to-read books that fill you with the pleasure. . .

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s La Superba is appropriately titled after the Italian city of Genoa, where, after escaping the pressures of fame in his own country, the semi-autobiographical narrator finds himself cataloguing the experiences of its mesmerizing inhabitants with the intention. . .

It took reading 44 pages of Intervenir/Intervene before I began to get a sense of what Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez were up to. Recurring throughout these 44 pages—throughout the entire book—are shovels, shovel smacks to the face, lobelias—aha!. . .

As presaged by its title, contradiction is the theme of Peter Stamm’s novel, All Days Are Night. Gillian, a well-known television personality, remains unknowable to herself. And Hubert, a frustrated artist and Gillian’s lover, creates art through the process of. . .

It’s a rare and wonderful book that begins and ends with violence and humor. At the start of Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years, Keret is in a hospital waiting for the birth of his first child while nurses, in. . .